How Small Is It The Atom

The Atom
{Abstract In this segment of our How small is it video book, we cover the atom.
We start with J.J. Thompsons Plum Pudding model of the atom. We then introduce Alpha, Beta and Gamma
radiation, and show how Ernst Rutherford used Alpha Particles in his scattering experiments to develop his version of
the atom. We then cover Niels Bohrs quantized atomic model along with input from Louis de Broglie who used the
wave nature of electrons to show that they take the form of standing waves enveloping the nucleus instead of point
particles orbiting the nucleus.
We then introduce Schrodingers Equation, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the Pauli Exclusion Principle
together with electron spin to fill out what we know about electrons around atoms. We explain electron tunneling as
an example of these concepts and introduce the Scanning Tunneling Microscope based on these concepts to see atoms by
feeling them.
In closing, we introduce the atomic nucleus and Chadwicks discovery of the neutron, review how small the nucleus is
and ask how it is that protons can hold together in the nucleus when there like charges should push them apart.}
Introduction
The ancient Greeks wondered how small things can get. One school of thought proposed that a
substance such as water could be cut in half infinitely. Others thought that you could only take it to
a point and then you would one atom of water. If you split that, you wouldnt have water any more.
They were right but they didnt have the tools to prove it.
In our first segment, we used photons and electrons to see things down to the size of a carbon atom
- 0.14 nanometers. Thats small. Atoms are so small, that there are as many atoms in your DNA as
there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy. In fact, there are more atoms in the breath of air I just took
than there are stars in the visible Universe!
The structure of the atom is responsible for nearly all the properties of matter that have shaped the
world around us and within us. But what do we actually know about atoms and how small are the
particles that combine to create an atom. Thats what this segment is all about. Well start with early
guesses about atomic structure and show how we figured out how it actually works. Its a fascinating
story and it will put us on the path to understanding elementary particles and the Higgs Boson.

[Music: Joseph Haydn Cello Concerto No. 2 in D This concerto was

composed in 1783 for a cellist and Orchestra. The piece's authenticity was doubted
for some time, but most experts now believe that the work is indeed authentic after
Haydn's autograph score was discovered in 1951.]

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How Small Is It The Atom

The Thompson Atom

In the 19th century, it was well understood
that the chemistry of substances consisted of
atoms. But we knew very little about atoms
themselves. It was the discovery of the
electron by JJ Thompson that first introduced
the idea that an atom had parts.
In 1898, with the electron being so light
compared to the atom, Thompson suggested
what is called the plum-pudding model of
the atom with a uniform mass of positively
charged matter containing spots of electrons
imbedded in it like plumbs in a pudding.

A way to find out if this model is correct or not, is to probe the pudding. But you need to probe with
something smaller than the object being probed. For example, you cant probe a grain of sand with your
finger. In 1898, there simply wasnt anything smaller than atoms that could be use to probe an atom.

Radioactivity
But around that time, radioactivity was
discovered by the French scientist Henri
Becquerel. Using uranium salts he was able to
blacken a photographic plate. Heres a
photograph of the plate.
Further research by Becquerel, Ernest
Rutherford, Madam Curie, and others
discovered 3 types of radiation. Heres how
they did it. A radiation source shines on a lead
plate with a small hole in it to create a beam.
The beam is directed at a florescent screen.
The screen flashes when it is struck.
Without any electric field present, the beam illuminates a single point on the screen. When an
electric field is applied, the beam is separated into three components. One is deflected upward by
the electric field indicating that it is negatively charged. These were named beta rays.

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How Small Is It The Atom

One is deflected downward, indicating that it

is positively charged. These were named
Alpha rays. The radiation that continued to hit
the center was not effected by the electric
field and therefore has no charge. These
emissions were named gamma rays.
[It was noted that the Alpha rays were deflected far less than the beta rays. This was because the
alpha particles are more massive than the beta particles. Youll recall the mass spectrometer we used
to measure the mass of electrons in our previous segment.]
It turned out that beta rays are high speed electrons. The alpha particles were later found to be
helium atoms without their electrons. The gamma rays turned out to be high energy photons, more
energetic than x-rays.
The Rutherford Atom

[Music: Mozart Violin Concerto No. 3 This beautiful concerto was

composed in 1775. Mozart was only 19 at the time.]
With Alpha particles, Rutherford had something to fire at atoms to see if they were indeed like a
positive pudding with imbedded electrons. Heres a graphic of the apparatus used to run the
experiment. An alpha particle emitting substance is placed behind a lead screen with a small hole in
it to enable a narrow beam of particles to flow through.
This beam is directed at a very thin gold foil.
A movable zinc sulfide screen is placed on the
other side of the foil. Zinc sulfide flashes
when hit by an alpha particle. A microscope
swivels to view all scattering angles.
If the Thompson model was correct, the
positively charged alpha particles would pass
through the distributed and therefore diluted
positive charge in the gold atoms with little or
no deflections.

But after days of observations heres what

they found.

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How Small Is It The Atom

While most of the alpha particles do go right through with only minor deflections, some were
scattered through very large angles. A few were even scattered in the backward direction! Rutherford
described it as almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it
came back at you.
To explain these results, Rutherford was
forced to picture an atom as being composed
of a tiny nucleus where the positive charge
and nearly all of its mass are concentrated,
with electrons some distance away.

Note that the closer the alpha particle is to the nucleus the greater the angle of the deflection. We
can use this angle to measure the maximum possible size of the nucleus.

To analyze scattering, we use geometry similar to what we used in parallax analysis to measure
distances to nearby stars. Rutherford also made careful measurements of the energy and momentum
of the alpha particles before and after the collisions.

At this level we use electron volts instead of joules. An electron volt is the energy it takes to move
one electron across one volt. There are 6,240 trillion electron volts in one joule. So you can see it is a
very small number. The energy of the naturally occurring alpha particles used by Rutherford where
7.7 million electron volts.
Rutherfords calculations showed that the diameter of a gold atom nucleus was 0.00003 nanometers.
That was ten thousand times smaller than the size of a gold atom.

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How Small Is It The Atom

Heres a picture of the test apparatus Hans

Geiger (of Geiger counter fame) and Ernest
Marsden built to look for scattered alpha
particles from every angle. The microscope
could be swiveled all the way around the gold
foil.
This is the first experiment that fired a beam of particles at a target to detect the scattering effects
and deduce what is going on. That was around a hundred years ago. This is exactly what we are
doing today at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) to find the Higgs Boson.
The Rutherford model of the atom left one
outstanding problem. In the Thompson
model, the electrons were stationary in the
positively charged pudding. But what keeps a
negatively charged electron from falling into
the positively charged nucleus - given that
opposite charges attract each other.
The first proposed solution was to assume that the electron is in
orbit around the nucleus like the Earth around the Sun. Just as
we can use gravitational and centripetal forces to calculate the
radius and velocity of a planet around the Sun, we can use
electric and centripetal forces to calculate the radius,
circumference, velocity, and revolutions per second of an
electron around the nucleus.
For Hydrogen, we get a very small circumference of around a third of a nanometer and a very large
velocity of around 1% of the speed of light. That combination gives us a fantastically large 660
trillion revolutions every second.
This would create a stable atom if the electron didnt have a
charge. But classical electromagnetic theory points out that an
accelerating charge radiates energy. Theoretically, the electron
should collapse into the nucleus in less than a trillionth of a
second.

And yet, we see that it does not collapse.

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How Small Is It The Atom

The Bohr Atom

[Music: Tomaso Albinoni Adagio in G minor This Adagio for violin,

strings and organ, is a neo-Baroque composition popularly attributed to the 18thcentury Venetian master Tomaso Albinoni, but actually composed by the 20thcentury musicologist and Albinoni biographer Remo Giazotto, purportedly based on
the discovery of a manuscript fragment of Albinoni. I fell in love with it watching the
movie Gallipoli.]
Youll recall from our How far away is it
segment on Distant Stars, that the light
spectrum from stars was covered by
thousands of dark lines called Fraunhofer
lines or spectral lines. Although these lines
had been studied for over a hundred years, no
one understood what they were.

In 1885, Johann Balmer

broke out a subset of these
lines for Hydrogen and
developed some
mathematical
interrelationships between
them.
Then, almost 30 years later, Niels Bohr developed a quantized momentum theory for the atom. That
partially explained these lines.
His model still had the electrons orbiting the
nucleus, but they could only orbit at certain
specific distances from the nucleus called
shells.

Each shell had its own unique energy level n

were n was a positive integer = 1, 2, 3, etc.
These were called the atoms quantum
numbers.

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How Small Is It The Atom

Electrons radiated energy when they changed

energy levels and the emitted or absorbed
light radiation had the energy difference
between the levels. This energy was equal to
Plancks Constant times the frequency of the
emitted light.
Although Bohrs model explained the Balmer series for Hydrogen spectra, there was no explanation
as to why the rapidly orbiting electrons didnt radiate, and there was no explanation as to why the
distances from the nucleus were as described.
The de Broglie Atom
In 1925, Louis de Broglie came up with the answer these two objections. Leveraging the recently
developed light particle-wave duality demonstrations, he proposed that electrons may have the same
wave-particle properties.
Earlier, we calculated the velocity of the
electron, so like we did for electron
microscopes in the previous segment, we can
now calculate its wavelength. We get exactly
the length of the electron orbits
circumference as enumerated by Bohr! In
other words, the wavelength of the electron is
exactly the length of one revolution. This
would create a standing wave!
A standing wave is a wave constrained to vibrate in a distance thats an exact multiple of its
wavelength. Anything more or less would create destructive interference and the wave would
collapse.
So the first energy shell would have to have the radius that creates the circumference that exactly fits
one wave. The second shell would have to have the radius that creates the circumference that exactly
fits two wavelengths. The third shell would have to have the radius that creates the circumference
that exactly fits three wavelengths, and so on.

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How Small Is It The Atom

Here are a couple of standing waves on a string.

Heres what three dimensional standing waves look like around a hydrogen nucleus. It is these
interesting geometries that give atoms their chemical properties.

So the proposed answer to the question How can an electron sit way outside the nucleus without
orbiting? is that the electrons exist as standing waves that envelop the nucleus. No orbital motion is
required and therefore, no radiation is emitted.
Remember that: electrons in an atom do not orbit the nucleus like planets around the sun they
exist as stationary standing waves.
[This simple geometry elegantly explained the reason for each energy shells distance from the center
and its corresponding energy. But it didnt scale to explain the spectra of more complex atoms that
have more electrons. And it could not explain how individual atoms interact with one another to
produce the physical and chemical properties that we observe in everyday life.]
Schrodingers equation
Given that particles travel as waves, it follows
that a generalized wave equation was needed
to mathematically describe them. Erwin
Schrodinger did just that.
The rub with Schrodingers equation is that the function that describes matter waves does not
represent an observable physical quantity. For example, there arent any electric or magnetic fields
involved that can be measured. The value of the wave function associated with a moving object at a
particular point and time is related to the likelihood of finding the body at that time. To be more
precise, the square of the wave function gives us the probability of experimentally finding the
particle at a particular location at a particular time.
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How Small Is It The Atom

For example, suppose we had a particle

moving from left to right at a specific speed.
From Newtons equations, the distance x is
equal to the speed v times the time t. After 24
seconds, we would say that the particle is
here.
But, because the particle moves as a matter wave, we need to use Schrodingers equations. So, when
you touch the wave at time t, it collapses into a particle. Where classical physics says it is here,
quantum mechanics says that here is the most likely place.
But there is a smaller probability that it is
here.

Or an even smaller probability that it is here.

In fact, there is a chance that it may be

anywhere along this probability curve, with
the probabilities dropping rapidly as we move
away from the most probable point.

Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle

[Music: Dave Porter Breaking Bad This is the opening theme for the

Breaking Bad television series. The star character, Mr. White, chose Heisenberg for
his cover name. This is the physicist who came up with the Uncertainty Principle.]
This brings us to the Heisenberg Uncertainty
Principle. In our quest to understand how
small things can get, we need to know if there
is a measure of size below which we cant go.
We see from our little thought experiment
that, as a wave, a particles location is not
fixed. The wave is spread out. Here we see
three different wave packets for an electron.

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How Small Is It The Atom

The wave packet at the top is narrow and therefore easier to

locate, but it is less than one wavelength, so its momentum is
impossible to figure out.

The bottom wave packet contains plenty of wavelength

information, but it is quite spread out and its location is more
uncertain.

The wave packet in the middle has enough wavelength

information make its momentum less uncertain, and it is less
spread out than the one on the bottom making its location less
uncertain.

But, due to the spread out nature of matter waves, we still cant know both the location and
momentum at the same time. Mathematically stated, the uncertainty in position times the uncertainty
in the momentum is always greater than or equal to Plancks constant. This is the Heisenberg
Uncertainty Principle. It has nothing to do with the accuracy of our instruments and everything to
do with the wave nature of matter.
A good way to illustrate this is to look at an electron in an energy well too deep for it to get out. But
remembering that the electron has a wave function that gives the probability of finding it at any
given point, and some of these points (admittedly with very very low probability) can be found
outside the walls of the well as if it had tunneled through the wall when it fact it did not.

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How Small Is It The Atom

Scanning Tunneling Electron Microscope (STM)

[Music: Georges Bizet L'Arlsienne This is the Overture for Alphonse

Daudet's play L'Arlsienne (usually translated as 'The Girl from Arles'). was
composed for the first performance of the play on 1 October 1872.]

This tunneling effect is the basis for Scanning

Tunneling Microscopes or STM for short.
Heres an STM at the Max Planck Institute.

It has a small pin head that is actually one

single atom at its tip. The tip is brought close
enough to the object for electrons to tunnel
across the space exactly in accordance with
Schrodingers equation. This creates an
electric current.

As the tip scans across the object, the current

will go up or down depending on weather an
atom is under the tip or not. This is repeated
over and over till the entire surface is mapped.
What we are doing is actually feeling the
surface of the object to see and measure the
atoms.

[With a little stronger pull, we can even

dislodge and move atoms. Here we see that
the folks at the Max Planck Institute moved
the atoms one by one to spell their institutes
initials MPI. The tag is just 6 nanometers
wide.]

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How Small Is It The Atom

Hydrogen Atom

[Music: Gustav Mahler Symphony No. 5 Composed in 1901 and 1902,

its most distinctive feature is the frequently performed Adagietto. The musical canvas
and emotional scope of the work are huge.]
Now lets get back to the atom.
The Schrodinger equation solution for a negatively charged electron trapped by a positively charged
nucleus identifies three quantum numbers for three quantities that are quantized in an atom: energy,
angular momentum and magnetic moment:

For Energy, we get the principal quantum number n. It describes the electron shell.

For angular quantum we get the orbital angular momentum quantum number . It describes
the sub-shells within each shell called out by n.

For magnetic moment, we get the magnetic quantum number m. It describes the
specific orbital within each sub-shell.

Spin and the Pauli Exclusion Principle

Although Schrodingers equation went a lot further than Bohr and de Broglie, there were still a
couple of things about the atom that were not completely explained.
1. When examined very closely, many spectral lines showed up as pairs instead of single lines as
called for by Schrodingers equation.

2. The splitting of spectral lines by magnetic fields was not accounted for. This is known as the
Zeeman effect.

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How Small Is It The Atom

3. It was not understood why all the electrons didnt all move to the innermost lowest energy
orbital.
In 1925, in order to deal with these issues, Wolfgang Pauli proposed a fourth quantum number and
his exclusion principle.
In classical physics, the exclusion principle
states that no two objects can occupy the
same space at the same time.

Paulis exclusion principle stated that no two particles could occupy the same quantum state at the
same time. But Pauli could find no physical explanation for the fourth quantum number.
Electron Spin
The physical explanation turned out to be electron spin. Electrons have an intrinsic property that is
best observed with a modern version of the Stern-Gerlach experiment that used silver atoms.
Here we use magnets and electrons directly.
The device has a north and south pole shaped
to create a magnetic field that is stronger near
the tip. This varies the forces on charged
particles passing through.

A magnet is sent through with the north pole

up and the south pole down.
The magnetic field creates a force that deflects
the magnet upward as it passes through the
field.
As we change the
orientation of the magnets
being sent through, we see
the change in the amount
and direction of the
deflections. The deflections
depend on the orientation.
This is as expected.
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How Small Is It The Atom

When we send large numbers of randomly

oriented magnets through the field, they arrive
anywhere vertically.
When electrons are sent through the field,
they too are deflected.
But they always arrive at the screen deflected
either up or down. Never in between like the
magnets.

Each electron behaves as a magnet, but with

only one of two possible orientations: up or
down. This intrinsic property of an electron is
called spin.
It is interesting to note that, whenever an
electron in an atom changes state, the atoms
angular momentum changes. For example,
here an electron moves from a higher energy
orbital with angular momentum to a lower
orbital with no angular momentum.
We see that the emitted photon carries away both the energy and the angular momentum, giving it a
spin = 1. This has been measured to be true for all electron quantum leaps.

With the Pauli Exclusion Principle and spin as the fourth

quantum number, the full set of spectral lines, orbitals, their
geometries, and interactions with each other fell into place.

The Nucleus
Now that we have a handle on the electrons around the atom, lets take a quick look at the nucleus.
For atoms to be neutral, the number of protons with a positive charge must equal the number of
electrons with their negative charge.

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How Small Is It The Atom

But mass spectrometers showed that atoms

have more mass than the number of protons
alone could account for. For example, carbon
has 6 protons and 6 electrons, but its mass is
just a tad more than the mass of 12 protons.
In the 1920s it was assumed that electronproton pairs existed in the nucleus to account
for the increase in mass without an increase in
charge. But with the advances in quantum
mechanics, it became clear that an electron
couldnt exist in a volume as small as the
nucleus. Ernest Rutherford and James
Chadwick proposed that a new particle (the
neutron) must exist in the nucleus to account
for the data.
In 1932, Chadwick performed an experiment verifying his suggestion. He ran alpha particles into
Beryllium that produced a radiation he guided into paraffin and then collected the resulting protons.
The key was working energy considerations
back from the protons ejected from the
paraffin on the right to the energy required in
the radiation coming out of the Beryllium on
the left. The conclusion was that the particles
hitting the paraffin were of the same mass and
energy as the protons but without any charge.
At this point it was generally accepted that the
neutron had indeed been discovered.
How Small Is It
In this segment, we developed the basic
quantum mechanics for electrons around the
atom and measured the size of atomic
components. At the end of our previous
segment, we used a Scanning Electron
Microscope to see carbon atoms 14
hundredths of a nanometer in diameter.
Using Rutherford scattering techniques covered in this segment, we measured the size of a proton at
7 millionths of a nanometer. Thats 20,000 times smaller than the atom. At this scale, we find that
the neutron is about the same size and mass as the proton.

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How Small Is It The Atom

Also in this segment we added spin as an intrinsic property of particles to go along with mass and
electric charge. Protons and Neutrons both display the same spin properties as electrons when they
traverse the Stern-Gerlach apparatus, so their spin is .
The notable difference between these particles
is that the Proton has a positive charge with
the same magnitude as the electrons negative
charge, but the Neutron is neutral with no
charge at all.

For the electron, its hard to talk about its size

because their wave packet is different for
every circumstance from standing waves in
thin atom shells, to scattered waves in an
electron microscope. What we did in this
segment was to calculate its length around the
Hydrogen nucleus at .0033 nm.
For photons, we see that they have no mass at all, no charge, and a spin equal to 1.
And, like the electron, it doesnt have a
volume per say because its a wave. But we
can measure its wavelength. For the gamma
rays used by Rutherford, the wavelength is
one one hundredth of a nanometer. Thats
51,000 times smaller than the wavelength of
green light.
Looking at the atoms nucleus, we see one main question:

How do positively charged protons pack together in the nucleus when their repulsive
positive charges would have them flying apart?

Well go into how we answer this question in our next segment on elementary particles.

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